US lawmakers would commit "significant policy error" if  they decided to subject p/c insurers to bank-style regulation in their efforts to overhaul regulation of financial services, Insurance Information Institute president Robert Hartwig said Wednesday. Economist Hartwig said that "bank-style regulation could needlessly raise insurance costs for hundreds of millions of insurance consumers and would unfairly require insurers to subsidies the reckless lending practices and speculative activities of failed banks". Noting that the US p/c insurers claims-paying capacity rose 11.8% to $511.5bn last year, Dr Hartwig said that "the resilience of the p/c insurance industry during time of extreme distress and volatility in the global economy and financial markets truly sets p/c insurers and reinsurers apart from the rest of the financial services industry". Including p/c insurers into sweeping financial reforms would be misguided because, as p/c insurers have noted, "they were not the cause of the [financial] crisis and the industry does not pose a systemic risk to the financial system", he said. "No p/c insurer failed because of the financial crisis, compared to more than 200 bank failures to date".